Day’s Worst: Komen CEO still on the job a year after Planned Parenthood controversy and earning nearly $700,000 a year

Nancy G. Brinker founded Komen after her sister’s death. The Denver Post

The Susan G. Komen Foundation said last week it was canceling nearly half of its fundraising races this year, blaming the economy but also acknowledging a little problem it had last year with its CEO, Nancy Brinker.

Komen decided early last year to stop giving Planned Parenthood grants for breast-cancer screenings, igniting a firestorm among abortion rights activists. But Brinker, the group’s founder and CEO, quickly reversed the decision and said in August she would be stepping down.

Ten months later, though, Brinker is still on the job, and as NBC reported, tax documents show she’s now earning $684,000 a year.

A Komen spokeswoman said a 64 percent raise came in 2010, before the Planned Parenthood debacle, but in any case, Brinker is earning one heckuva salary for a CEO who damaged her organization’s brand so profoundly.

Ken Berger, president and CEO of Charity Navigator, which evaluates and rates charities, told NBC that Brinker’s salary was “extremely high.”

“This pay package is way outside the norm,” he said. “It’s about a quarter of a million dollars more than what we see for charities of this size. … This is more than the head of the Red Cross is making for an organization that is one-tenth the size of the Red Cross.”

If the Komen organization wasn’t hopelessly damaged before now, it surely will be with revelations of Brinker’s outrageous salary.

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

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